It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been busy! I have a life outside of this blog you know! I’ve been busy with my new collegiate lifestyle, and have spent the last few weeks sewing leather patches onto my tweed jacket, or is that tweed patches onto a leather jacket? Either way I’ve ruined two perfectly good jackets.

Anyway, outside of being elbow deep in an academic quagmire, I’ve managed to take a trip outside of the cultural vacuum of Melbourne. I went to Darwin!

What this has to do with skateboarding is pretty vague, but I’ll get there I promise.

I always regret forgetting my board when I go travelling. There is nothing worse than finding the most incredible park in the most unlikely location… and all you can do is cry that ‘you would totally shred this place’.

I will never forgive myself for travelling mainland China with no board and meeting these kids…

At this spot…..

I didn’t forget my board this time, and actually got to skate a park most people will never see, and in conditions that most nancy Melbournites would wilt under. It was the beginning of the wet season, 10,000% humidity, 38 degrees, and I was out at a neat little country town called Humpy Doo! I’m not kidding…..

The park is by no means amazing, it’s actually pretty rough, but the fact that people even skate up in Darwin is mind blowing.

Everything at the top end wants to kill you. Snakes, buffalo, spiders, crocodiles and dingoes would all happily take your life. Shit, in the wet season the soil produces a particular spore that – if it were to come in contact with an open wound – would kill you. The dirt will kill you! Darwin is raw as shit.

So are the locals….

Imagine you had a big night with your bro’s and instead of waking up on your couch or on the floor of your ‘artist’ friend’s studio, you woke up here…..

Scary huh?

Darwin has skateparks and skateboarders who both manage a triumph against adversity. Imagine waiting 6 months for it to stop raining to get your shred on! Keep in mind that street skating is almost non-existent when non-stop rain and cyclones have rendered the streets to ‘cheese grater’ status. Its not like you can go surfing in the meantime… there are things in the water that will kill you faster than those on the land!

Darwin is exactly what is so cool about Australia, its scary, full of rednecks and really fucking dangerous! As if you don’t want to take your board there and try your luck!

This is the part where I take umbrage with Melbournites. Recently I took a night out of my academic toil to sink a couple of longnecks and mix with the world. Granted St. Jeromes is already a cliché, but what the fuck is up with the way kids ‘slap on a persona’ these days?

I understand the inspiration, but the uber tight jeans, pointed shoes, tucked in shirt and the ‘I don’t care about my eastern suburbs, private education upbringing… its so passé’? Their attitudes are so fucked. It’s a visual representation of the forced laughs of 1,000 art-house movie patrons.

These anorexic pricks sole their feet with K-Mart shoes that would be better employed as bloodied tourniquets for World War One shell shock veterans.

Couple this with deliberately loose fitting ‘ironic’ tees and their equally manicured girlfriends; that put any Stella at Q Bar to shame – and you have irony upon twisted irony. Who’s going to fix the broken light bulb at home when your jeans won’t let you get onto the chair?

For the most part, they look like extras in a Dexys Midnight Runners film clip. Lost, confused and weird. Did you see how many dudes were in that band? Lost, confused and weird.

Shit, some of them look like they never made it off the casting couch at Dexy’s and headed straight to the Thompson Twins instead.

Get your constricted genitalia out of those designer (yet trife) jeans and swing them in a different breeze. Return your pants and attitude to Fat for a full refund, and find out where you put your board that time you decided avant garde electro pop was a much cooler pursuit. Jump into a creek that might have crocs in it and slappy a curb you never thought you would, or try a frontside 5-0 in a place where the ambulance has to fly to…. You might feel better for it!